Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is emerging as one of the important radio technologies enabling the Internet of things and home automation. However, BLE only serves to compliment and co-operate with existing household radio systems. For example, ZigBee exists already in set-top boxes and can be configured to provide coverage over an entire home via its low-power mesh networking capabilities. BLE compliments this service by providing users with an ability to easily control smart home functions from their smartphone. In addition, traditional services such as Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi), wireless remote control systems, and wireless telephone systems will continue to play a huge role in the home radio environment.
At the same time, BLE home automation radio systems are found both in smart phones and a wide variety of home automation device nodes such as light bulb switches and sensor devices. For flexibility and ease of installation, these radio systems operate on small coin cell batteries. Thus, BLE radio systems geared towards home automation need to function properly in a radio environment with significant radio interference from other systems. Moreover, BLE radio systems need to achieve the desired performance at low cost and using low-power communications techniques.
Most of the power consumed during digital baseband signal processing by a BLE system typically occurs during packet detection and synchronization of incoming BLE packets. Thus, there is a need for a new low-complexity and low-power method for packet synchronization that achieves higher performance in practical BLE environments.